The Digital Bedouins and the Backpack Office

PetManimal writes "The laptop and wireless revolutions have led to the rise of a new class of digital 'Bedouins' — tech workers who ply their crafts from Starbucks and other locations with WiFi access. Another article describes some strategies and tools for embracing the Bedouin way of life, and even having fun: 'If you have the right kind of job, you can take vacations while you're on the clock. In other words, you can travel for fun and adventure and keep on working. You can travel a lot more without needing more official vacation time. I've done it. In August I took a month long vacation to Central America, backpacking from one Mayan ruin to the next, and I never officially took time off. I submitted my columns, provided reports and other input, participated in conference calls and interacted via e-mail. I used hotel Wi-Fi connections and local cybercafes to communicate and Skype to make business calls. Nobody knew I was sunburned, drinking from a coconut and listening to howler monkeys as I replied to their e-mails.'"

Comments

Mayans?

[Paolo DF]

So, mayans had developed wifi technology? ;-)
This explains a lot...

Re:Mayans?

[iminplaya]

Yeah, but they're gonna have big trouble with the Y2K12 bug.

I think that's pretty rare.

[Morinaga]

I'm not sure about anyone else but that sounds like one of the worst "vacations" possible to me. Perhaps his type of work lends itself to productivity in such an environment. I wouldn't be as productive and more importantly I wouldn't enjoy my vacation all that much. I see the appeal and relative productivity of sitting in a cafe or park and getting work done but to really travel and sight-see?

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[SoTuA]

I agree - I took 'vacations' where I was supposed to keep in touch via laptop (email, skype, etc) and it made it for me impossible to create the mental disconnect that is the requisite of proper rest during vacations.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[cascadingstylesheet]

I see the appeal and relative productivity of sitting in a cafe or park and getting work done but to really travel and sight-see?

Well, for one thing, you're already there. So at 4:00 or 5:00 PM you shutdown, put your laptop away, and walk a few feet to do something fun, instead of still having to get on a plane :)

Sheesh, if you're having enough fun on a "real vacation", you probably wouldn't wake up until then anyway ;)

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[SydBarrett]

That would sound awesome except for that whole working part. I guess some people can't really enjoy the tropics without a LCD screen in your face or banging away like a crazed badger at your blackberry while shoving fistfulls of Pocky into your eat-hole.

Either work or dont work, stop half-assing it already. You dont travel to someplace nice just to do the same shit you do at the office because it's like going to England just to eat at McDonalds. You updated some dohicky from India just the same as you could from home. That's really fucking impressive. Be sure to tell us all what you DIDN'T do there since you dont have the will power to PUT DOWN THE FUCKING LAPTOP ALREADY.

You are just wasting your time. Even though you are getting paid, you are stuck someplace great that you cant enjoy fully since your bizarre nerd ego demands that you never stop working at all. I bet the grankids will love that story of how you were deep in some jungle when you BRAVELY REPLIED TO THAT IMPORTANT EMAIL. Wow, dad! Tell us again how bad the signal strength was!

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[PopeRatzo]

I've tried it, too, and it sucked. A "working vacation" is neither.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[flyingsquid]

I'm on the other side of the spectrum, in that I prefer to travel for work. I feel that my interactions with the culture and the people are a little more genuine when I have a real reason to be there, other than to take pictures of the cute little brown children and pose in front of old buildings. Trying to live a normal, day-to-day existence in a foreign country, versus doing the tour thing, gives you a better appreciation of what the country is really like, I think.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[Otter]

I bet the grankids will love that story of how you were deep in some jungle when you BRAVELY REPLIED TO THAT IMPORTANT EMAIL.

The point is that he is in the jungle while you and I are bitching at each other from our desks in the middle of a snowstorm!

I don't understand what is so freaking difficult about this concept -- the idea is that you get **MORE** vacation, not that you enjoy it less.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[fishbowl]

>The point is that he is in the jungle while you and I are bitching at each other from our desks in the
>middle of a snowstorm!

Not me. I'm bitching from a rooftop in the middle of Balboa Island. My boss thinks I'm in a hotel room in Costa Mesa.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[Do You Smell That]

Assuming your post isn't a joke (it is modded funny, afterall)... Recently my company sent me to Holland for 2 1/2 months of training. Never having been outside the US before (Canada totally doesn't count), this was an incredible opportunity. All the benefits of vacationing in a foreign country (when you're working, you still get weekends off and have the right to use sick days... accruing more of them all the while), but without having to worry about moving in, finding yourself a hotel, etc. Plenty of time after work every day to go out and mix with the locals, and you're in town long enough to actually find your way around and pick up a bit of the language and culture. If you look at it from the point of view of "I'm doing my same job, just from a much cooler office" instead of "I'm on vacation stuck doing work for the man", you'll feel much better about the whole thing. Then again, the more I think of it, my situation is nothing like that in the article... in his case, the vacation was his idea. :sigh: Time to go home.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[raju1kabir]

I'm not sure about anyone else but that sounds like one of the worst "vacations" possible to me. Perhaps his type of work lends itself to productivity in such an environment. I wouldn't be as productive and more importantly I wouldn't enjoy my vacation all that much. I see the appeal and relative productivity of sitting in a cafe or park and getting work done but to really travel and sight-see?

Three years ago, with yet another business trip to the other side of the world (Asia) coming up, I decided on a whim to put all my stuff in storage and give notice to my landlord. I had a bunch of projects in Asia on the horizon, so I figured I'd just hang out there for a few months.

Well, it's been more than a few months. I am renting an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, where I spend about 1/3 of the time (those periods when I really need to sit at my desk and focus). Another 1/3 of the time I'm on-site for work, which could be anywhere in the world.

But the good part is, since my expenses are so much lower over here (I'm paying half the rent for a flat twice the size), I have plenty of money left over for plane tickets. So the other third of the year I toss my laptop in a bag and go anyplace that sounds interesting that the airlines have on sale. Australia, Bali, Spain, Morocco, Korea, to name some of the most recent. Heading to Oman in a few weeks. I find hotels with decent internet connection (believe it or not, it's usually the cheap ones where you get the best net access) and let Asterisk route my calls to me, and nobody's the wiser.

No, it's not a traditional vacation. I don't spend a rigidly demarcated two weeks totally divorced from routine, with colleagues and work a distant memory. I normally have to at least think about work every day, and occasionally I find myself doing 10 or 12 hour days in a place where I'd really rather be outside.

But when my "vacation" lasts 4 months a year, I don't mind that. The memory of a few 10-hour stretches melts away when I walk outside and spend the rest of my time being fascinated by my environment, eyes wide open and days filled with discovery and wonder. Since I buy my air tickets in Asia, I can normally push back my return to make up for unexpected work, without paying change fees.

And to be honest, the other 4 months, the ones I spend in Malaysia, are pretty vacationey too. Tropical weather, weekend trips to the beach, monkeys in the trees, exotic holidays and festivals around every corner... the thought of going back to spending the year sitting in the office unless pulled elsewhere by work, well, it's unthinkable.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[Anomolous Cowturd]

Tell it brother. All these people working in pleasant environments are missing the whole point of work. It's supposed to suck. I personally won't settle for anything more than a cramped cubicle with inadequate air-conditioning, poor lighting, and an extremely uncomfortable chair. I *need* an overbearing control-freak breathing down my neck while I'm working, and lazy colleagues interrupting me to offload things they're too incompetent to handle themselves. At the end of the day, I demand an exhausting commute home of no less than two hours. If I don't collapse with exhaustion before I make it to my bed, I feel sorely disappointed.

These Bedouin jokers are missing out on the good life.

Re:I think that's pretty rare.

[aclarke]

You're looking at this from a very narrow perspective. Let me ask you this: if the only tools you needed to work were a laptop, internet connection and mobile phone, would you rather work your whole year in some windowless cubicle, or spend a few weeks of it in a luxury hotel by the beach, or at a ski resort, or whatever floats your boat?

I've been self employed for a few years. I've spent my time in various cafes for various reasons, and most of the time it was because I was going to be more productive there. Last year my wife took a course in Austria for 3 weeks. I could have stayed at home I suppose, but why? We just rented a hotel room with internet access, and I took my laptop and Vonage phone and it was business as usual. We now also got to write the whole trip off for both of us. I still got to get out hiking and exploring, I got to experience Austria to some extent, and we took 4 days or so off at the end of the trip to just have a mini vacation.

Are you seriously telling me that I should have stayed at home because going to Austria was a "bad vacation"? Come on. And no I don't take my work with me on every vacation; that was our second trip to Europe for the year. The first one was for 3 weeks and I left my laptop at home.

Need better infrastructure

[cyberbob2351]

I've tried this lifestyle as a daily campus activity, and I have noted the following observations.

• Laptop battery life still sucks. Someone start working on a solar solution :)
• Even on campus, good WiFi hotspots are few and far between. We need hotspots that permit ssh tunneling, and encryption that works...Cell phones with internet hookups are probably the only option if you are backpacking Mayan ruins...
• The home desktop will always be more comfortable, and as a result my files will always be there. Transferring them to the laptop on the fly is a pain when home upload speeds are so terrible with most ISP's
• You lose lots of weight when you are out and about, seeing as how you don't have a home food supply to compel you. A major plus.
• The public environment can be quite distracting, especially when you know people that always come and speak to you. Try and find a lonely corner, and suddenly finding a power supply and/or internet link can be challenging.

Oh yeah?

[br0d]

Let's see you telecommute from oblivion on 12/23/2012.

Meh

[Stanistani]

>Nobody knew I was sunburned, drinking from a coconut and listening to howler monkeys as I replied to their e-mails.

If I just make myself a mug from a coconut, I'm there. I've got the cube next to the window.

*listens to the howling of middle management*

I miss it

[HikingStick]

I had a good thing (albeit not as good as the author's) going before I took a new position in December. Now, I'm paying my dues in my new area. Before, it was working from home at least two days a week. Unlike some, I didn't have a problem shutting the machine down at the end of my day. I loved sitting out on the deck (in good weather) and enjoying the sun while handling my trouble tickets. Even better was going to the local cafe (in a small exurban town, equipped with a Verizon wireless card, and doing my work from there while clogging my arteries with a 3-egg bacon and swiss omelette! Most days, I was working by 6 AM and done by 2:30 PM. I figure I'll need to wait another six months before I can pitch a similar arrangement in my new digs (once they know I can be trusted to perform, no matter where I am).

Man, I'm working for the wrong people

[Jimmy King]

You can travel a lot more without needing more official vacation time. I've done it.

Everywhere I've worked you don't get a laptop and VPN access so that you can stay home and work. You get them so that after you've spent the day at work you can go home and continue to do more work.

The Right Kind Of Job

[Tackhead]

> 'If you have the right kind of job, you can take vacations while you're on the clock. [ ... ] Nobody knew I was sunburned, drinking from a coconut and listening to howler monkeys as I replied to their e-mails.'"

If you really have the right kind of job, you can take vacations while you're on the clock without the hassle of air travel, without the pain of the sunburn, with a slightly-modified version of the coconut, and yes, even with the howler monkeys.

I call it "reading Slashdot while sitting in a meeting".

This is nothing new...

[KeyThing]

4 years ago, I was working for myself as a field technician. I had basically farmed myself out to about 6 different companies, and was supporting their IT needs.

It became very obvious to me that I needed Internet Access anywhere I was. I found the Merlin PCS card (EVDO), and a PCMCIA sleeve for my iPAQ. I added "mobile professional" to my list of qualifications, and immediately cut down my response times to my customers. Now I could be stuck in traffic, and be remoted into their system. Often times, the problems they had could be resolved without the need for me to show up at their location. This, in turn, allowed me to add more customers to my base. At the high point, I was supporting 12 different customers. Each signed an agreement that provided me with desk space and Internet Access at their location, and an acknowledgment that at times, I would be physically at their locations while supporting one of my other customers.

I ended up selling my business model and customer base off for a nice profit. I now code full time, and have added the Kyocera KR1 to the mix of hardware I take with me. I just got back from a trip to Washington DC, and people had no idea I wasn't sitting here in my office. BTW, a real cheesy video of the KR1 can be found here: http://www.keything.com/tv . I highly recommend it. During my trip to washington, it didn't miss a beat.

Re:Woof

[Stanistani]

Or even a Prairie Dog.
From Wikipedia:
"In companies that use large numbers of cubicles in a common space, employees sometimes use the term "prairie dogging" to refer to the action of standing up in one's cube to look around or converse with another employee in an adjacent cube. This action is thought to resemble prairie dogs standing in the openings of a burrow."

Missing the point...

[Ted Cabeen]

This is my favorite part:

A client calls your office number and imagines you in a suit in a downtown office. In fact, you're wearing jeans and enjoying a midmorning brunch with your spouse. The client is happy because he reached you in one try and didn't get voice mail. Your employer is happy because you're providing prompt and reliable customer service. But most of all, you're happy, because you're doing your job without being chained to a desk. What about your spouse in this situation? Do you think they appreciate having their midmorning brunch interrupted by a client's phone call? Interrupts cost, both in computing and in social relationships.

Re:Missing the point...

[Dunbal]

Interrupts cost, both in computing and in social relationships.


      Nah, just push your wife on the stack, clear the registers, and pop her off when you're done and jumping back. Of course the script kiddies won't get ANY of this ;P

Re:Life is a Tradeoff

[PFI_Optix]

I'm curious how political positions can "destroy the lives of foreigners", and how that justifies a military attack or is the responsibility of Americans.

There are thousands of homeless people who are homeless because some rich guy's business failed or moved or just laid off a few hundred people in order to stay competitive. Their lives were destroyed by the actions of these powerful people...does that justify an attack? Are those in power not innocent simply because their actions resulted in one person's life being "destroyed"? I don't think so. Sure there are a lot of rich men who simply don't care about the workers they trod all over in search of the almighty dollar; but there are plenty who agonize over every layoff, every person whose life is affected by their efforts to maintain a healthy business.

Here's a better argument:

We are number 172 out of 230 countries in poulation density. Many of the nations below us either possess vast areas of inhospitable land (Russia and Canada). The rest...well, I wouldn't want to visit most of them. In other words, we're a nation with a lot of room to grow.

I make that point to say this: the more work we do, the more we cut down our population growth. Look at Japan with its negative growth rate; they're a nation obsessed with work. They're also the nation that reports the least frequent sex among narried couples; as a married man, I strongly object to this!

You rang?

[bedouin]

Hi.

McDonalds in England

[Slashdot Parent]

You dont travel to someplace nice just to do the same shit you do at the office because it's like going to England just to eat at McDonalds.

In fairness to McDonalds, the cuisine at your local neighborhood McDonalds is far superior to anything purporting to be British food.

Re:McDonalds in England

[Fulcrum of Evil]

In fairness to McDonalds, the cuisine at your local neighborhood McDonalds is far superior to anything purporting to be British food.

So go get a curry. You're in London fer chris'sake.

No, not always!

[anomaly]

I speak from experience here - father of five, happily married and a great sex life with my wife!

Just because you get married doesn't mean your sex life suffers. In fact, I'd argue that when you learn great relationship skills the frequency and quality of sex increases dramatically.

YMMV.

Anomaly

When it works, it works :) (and a few tips)

[timothy]

I did this a lot until the current stretch in law school, which keeps me pretty well stuck in Philadelphia for a while.

However, there are a few things which make it easier that I recommend:

- An outlet splitter. When someone else has dibs on ("sovereignty over") the only electric outlet in a particular place, and your battery life is draining-draining-draining, you may luck out and find that he (or she) is reasonable, sharing-oriented, etc. Or, he (or she) may just be a greedy, sanctimonious ass. If you have an outlet splitter (one plug leading to two female plugs on short leashes), (a) it's hard to turn down your request to share the outlet, (b) it may gain you that cruicial 12 extra inches so's you can actually work on a flat surface and (c) it may let you plug in another device which needs a wallwart -- some of those are very finicky for reasons related to gravity, and it's nice not to block out others with your AC-to-DC bricklet. Just slightly larger, a small powerstrip does the same thing.

- A WiFi detector, if you need WiFi and work from a laptop. There are a few choices out there (I reviewed the Canary version a while back) that will show lots more than that there might be a network around -- ESSID, strength, encryption, etc. Using one of these may save you a lot of battery juice. If you already carry a pocket PC with WiFi built in, this is probably redundant.

- A USB key, kept on your person. Even moreso than in an office or at home, galavanting about with a laptop in vacationland may attract attention of the wrong sort. I've never had a laptop stolen, but sometimes that's been despite my idiocy in preferring to leave it on the table running rather than pack everything into a bag to wait in line for another cup of coffee. Alternatively, the more travel you do, the more opportunities you have to drop your laptop. USB keys are now capacious enough and cheap enough for nearly anyone whose work is mostly *text* oriented to save their important documents frequently, so if the worst happens, you haven't lost all your data. There have been a few Ask Slashdots about the most important apps and data to keep on a USB key, which are worth poring through. You could have a complete Linux distro on there, with quite a bit of room left for documents, too. The other day I saw at Target (in Pennsylvania, USA) 512MB Dane Electric USB drives for $9.99.

- A live Linux distro on CD, if not on USB key or similar. If a hard drive goes south, but you have another otherwise functional laptop, having along a Linux distro can be very handy.

- The idea of laptop-commuting from a tropical isle sounds more idyllic than it necessarily is; one of the big problems of working from "anywhere" is that you don't always get to choose the angle of the sun. For a while I used (though haven't needed and may have now lost it) an item of commercial manufacture which folded down like a diagonally disected cardboard box, made of a plasticy-cardboardy stuff, and which attached with velcro to a laptop to provide a glare blocking semi-enclosure. It folded down to the size of a thickish magazine, weighed just a few ounces. I'm sure you could improvise such a thing out of duct tape, chopsticks, and construction paper ...

timothy

Re:About working from Malaysia...

[raju1kabir]

But how was it getting yourself set up there? Visa, renting an apartment, bank account, medical insurance, car, that kind of stuff. Was it tricky? Particularly assuming you didn't speak Malay....

Visa: No visa required to spend 4 months a year here. Actually you can spend 5 months at a time (three automatically on entry, then a 2-month extension). But the clock resets every time you leave and come back in.

Apartment: Just found something in the newspaper. I spent about a week looking when I first arrived, but it seems to be a renter's market. My landlord says they're really overbuilding.

Bank account: Haven't bothered. ATM and credit cards from elsewhere work, and there's online banking. With a spouse visa you should have no trouble setting up a bank account. Or your wife could.

Medical insurance: I kept my insurance from home in case of emergency, but haven't used it. Doctor's visit plus prescription usually runs me about US$15. Dental - I got a crown, the full cash price was less than my deductible would have been back when I was living in the US.

Car: I don't like driving. Here in the centre of town there's little need. I can walk to most of the places I need to go. I never have to wait more than 5 minutes for a taxi and the most expensive taxi ride I've ever had, other than to the airport, was less than US$5 (most are less than $1).

Language: A considerable number of people are completely fluent in English; everyone speaks some. It's obviously a self-selected group, but the vast majority of my friends here speak it as their preferred language. Some examples about the ubiquity of English: My lease is in English; when you go to the phone company web site to read about DSL, the information is only available in English, not Malay; there are four major English-language daily newspapers in Kuala Lumpur; foreign movies are shown in their original English (sometimes with Malay subtitles) in the cinema; the Yellow Pages is in English; and so on.

I took Malay classes for 6 weeks and enjoyed it, but I haven't had much chance to use the language except for ordering in restaurants and basic polite formalities. Now I'm planning to study Mandarin instead.